The link between the mind and the body is very powerful. We only have to observe someone’s body language to know what sort of mood they’re in. But does it work in reverse? Can the body change the mind?

There’s a theory called ‘Embodied Cognition’ that says it can. Quite simply, if you want to feel more powerful then adopt a powerful posture or to feel more relaxed adopt a relaxed pose.

Carney et al. (2010) found that when people stood or sat in powerful poses for one minute — those involving open limbs and expansive gestures — they not only felt more powerful but had increased levels of testosterone flooding their systems. Powerful poses take up more space, so spread your body and open up the arms or legs. When you dominate the space, your mind gets the message. With practice it can be a shortcut to gaining a positive confident mindset.

We know from studies (and real life!) that individuals may be limited by the amount of ‘processing space‘ our brains have. As every mental and physical task requires a finite amount of processing space, if we don’t learn ways to develop our processing skills, we are inviting failure. This concept is known as the Capacity Model.

The practicalities of this concept were described excellently by the legendary Celtics basketball player Bill Russell:

“Each of us has a finite amount of energy, and things you do well don’t require as much. Things you don’t do well take more concentration. And if you’re fatigued by that, then things you do best are going to be affected”.

The good news is that you can train your brain to process better through learning, development and using the right exercises. It’s an excellent example of why athletes need to train their brains as well as their bodies!

Have you ever wondered how people remain motivated to achieve a task when faced with extreme difficulties and obstacles?

Consciously we can plan, prepare and use a whole host of goal setting techniques but according to some new research it seems that our unconscious minds play an important part in this too. The research (Huang et al 2012) explored whether people’s mental representation of their progress in the task helps to motivate them into continued effort in the pursuit of completing the task. What they discovered was that when individuals have just started pursuing a goal and have made only limited progress, they exaggerate the achieved progress level in their mental representation to signal a higher chance of eventual goal attainment and thus elicit greater effort. In contrast, when people have made substantial progress and are approaching the goal attainment, they downplay the achieved progress in their mental representation to create greater perceived discrepancy, hence eliciting greater effort in finishing the task.

The researchers tested their findings in other situations and found similar results.

In both situations the mind is warping what they were seeing to give them extra motivation. Although strictly speaking the minds estimation is less accurate than reality, it’s all in the service of achieving something more important: reaching that vital goal.

This is one great example of the way our cognitive biases can be extremely handy for us. This finding is fascinating because it’s demonstrating how sometimes getting precise information about our progress can actually reduce motivation. For example if you’re on the running machine at the gym and you’ve just started your workout, then the fact that the display tells you exactly how far you’ve got to go leaves no room for these helpful unconscious biases to operate.

Sometimes it really is better not to know. Instead let your unconscious give you a helping hand on towards your goal.

Out of the 10,500 athletes who are competing at the London 2012 Games only 302 will win. The rest will be left to navigate the kaleidoscope of emotions that comes with failing to win.

Many athletes struggle to cope with the weight of expectation that is placed upon them by their supporters and their expectant compatriots. Although physically many of them recover well after losing at a big event like the Olympic Games, sadly many of them never recover mentally. It’s easy to understand why when you consider the intense media scrutiny athletes have to live and perform under during the Games.

So how can athletes cope? Well, athletes certainly should set appropriate expectation levels and keep their performances in a proper perspective but many experts are now calling for the more direct approach of mentally preparing for defeat.

If you are on a mission to become great in a sporting or intellectual endeavour, you should expect plenty of failures on the way, especially during practise. But that shouldn’t put you off, in fact if you want to become a master at what you do you should have a passion for it. How is that helpful? Well, several themes regarding practice consistently come to light according to author David Shenk in his book The Genius in All of Us:

1. Practice changes your body. Researchers have recorded a constellation of physical changes (occurring in direct response to practice) in the muscles, nerves, hearts, lungs, and brains of those showing profound increases in skill level in any domain.

2. Skills are specific. Individuals becoming great at one particular skill do not serendipitously become great at other skills. Chess champions can remember hundreds of intricate chess positions in sequence but can have a perfectly ordinary memory for everything else. Physical and intellectual changes are ultraspecific responses to particular skill requirements.

3. The brain drives the brawn. Even among athletes, changes in the brain are arguably the most profound, with a vast increase in precise task knowledge, a shift from conscious analysis to intuitive thinking (saving time and energy), and elaborate self-monitoring mechanisms that allow for constant adjustments in real-time.

4. Practice style is crucial. Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve.

5. Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it’s impossible to become great overnight.

“Across the board, these last two variables — practice style and practice time — emerged as universal and critical. From Scrabble players to dart players to soccer players to violin players, it was observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills, but also exhibited a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that K. Anders Ericsson came to call ‘deliberate practice.’ First introduced in a 1993 Psychological Review article, the notion of deliberate practice went far beyond the simple idea of hard work. It conveyed a method of continual skill improvement. ‘Deliberate practice is a very special form of activity that differs from mere experience and mindless drill,’ explains Ericsson. ‘Unlike playful engagement with peers, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. It … does not involve a mere execution or repetition of already attained skills but repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level which is associated with frequent failures.’ …

This approach to practise requires a mindset of constant improvement driven through self-critique and an almost pathological drive to push oneself beyond current capabilities to a new level of ability. This inevitably leads to frequent failure and disappointment but rather than being de-motivating these failures and disappointments become almost desired because they demonstrate that progress is underway. This developes a ceaseless desire to pick oneself up and try again and again until success is achieved. But how long does it take to become a true master of your sport or your art or your profession. Well Ericsson also revealed some amazing insights into this particular conundrum as Shenk reveals in his book.

“The physiology of this process also requires extraordinary amounts of elapsed time — not just hours and hours of deliberate practice each day, Ericsson found, but also thousands of hours over the course of many years. Interestingly, a number of separate studies have turned up the same common number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years’ time (which comes to an average of three hours per day). From sublime pianists to unusually profound physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark.”

I don’t know about you but I think I’d better go out and do some practise…

Enjoy the game!
Stuart.

Book Title: The Genius in All of Us: New Insights into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (2010)
by David Shenk
Published by Anchor

One of the most commonly discussed concepts in sport is the idea of performance flow. The ‘zone’ that athletes get into where their minds and bodies are at one and their performance soars to the highest level.

In this interesting article, the guys from PsyBlog give us their view of Flow – in under 300 words!